104 Principles of Landscape- Gardening 



ages; those slavish terrors which, in the ages of ignorance, appeared ahnost to 

 make the resurrection an unhoped for, rather than a hoped for, event; terrors 

 altogether at antipodes to those just fears that call upon man, ere death, to 

 make up his peace with Heaven ? This slavish and more than vulgar error 

 was chiefly engendered through the monkish artifice of associating man's latter 

 end with all that was disgusting and horrible, and of inspiring the world with 

 the idea, that, to gain heaven, it was not necessary to exist rationally on earth. 

 Amid the general gloom thus created l)y penances and pilgrimages, by mid- 

 night masses and bloody flagellations, the troubled imaginations of Europe, as 

 D'lsraeli says, ' first beheld the grave yawn, and death, in the Gothic form 

 of a gaunt anatomy, parading through the universe. The people were af- 

 frighted as they viewed every where hung before their eyes, in the twilight of 

 their cathedrals and their pale cloisters, the most revolting emblems of death. 

 Their barbarous taste perceived no absurdity in giving action to a heap of 

 dry bones, which could only keep together in a state of immovability and 

 repose; nor that it was burlesquing the awful idea of the resurrection, by ex- 

 hibiting the incorruptible spirit under the unnatural and ludicrous figure of 

 mortality, drawn out of the corruption of the grave.' If supernatural terror 

 sprang from such causes, it was from the gloomj', naked, and deserted ceme- 

 tery that superstition drew her chief influence. Thence flitted the phantoms 

 which terrified the vulgar, and which even carried dread to the thrones of 

 kings and emperors. Solitude peopled itself with ghosts and spectres ; 

 silence disturbed itself with hollow groans ; while Nature, reversing her laws, 

 allowed the dead to collect their scattered mouldering bones, and to appear, 

 at the witching hour of night, wrapt in a winding-sheet. The monsters 

 wiiich man's imagination thus created, he turned from with horror ; they 

 broke his rest in the silence of the winter's night; he heard their cry in the 

 howl of the winds, their threat in the roar of the tempest. If the corrupters 

 of Christianity still attempt to terrify rather than to console humanity, and 

 if superstition still exercises her fatal spell, does it not become the duty of 

 every wellwisher to his species, to pour into the tomb the light of religion 

 and philosophy, and thereby to dissipate the vain phantoms which the false 

 gloom of the grave has tended to call forth. The decoration of the cemetery 

 is a mean peculiarly calculated to produce these effects. Beneath the shade 

 of a spreading tree, amid the fragrance of the balmy flower, surrounded on 

 every hand with the noble works of art, the imagination is robbed of its 

 gloomy horrors, the wildest fancy is freed t>om its debasing fears. Adorn 

 the sepulchre, and the frightful visions which visit the midnight pillow will 

 disappear ; and if a detestation for annihilation, mingled with the fondest 

 affection for those who are departed, should lead men still to believe that the 

 dead hold communion with the living, the delightful illusions which will 

 result from this state of things will form a pleasing contrast to the vile super- 

 stitions that preceded them. Let the fancied voice of a father pierce, in the 

 silence of the night, the ear of the son who liyes unmindful of his parent's 

 early counsels ; or let the shade of a warning mother appear in the lunar ray, 

 to the thoughtless and giddy eye of her who threatens to sacrifice her beauty 

 and her virtue at the shrine of flattery. These fancies, the children of a 

 pious sorrow, will neither debase the human mind, nor check the generous 

 impulses of the human heart." (^Necropolis G/asguetisi,t, p. 62.} 



The remaining point to be noticed is, the influence which a cemetery or a 

 churchyard is calculated to have in improving the taste. That churchyards 

 have had very little influence of this kind hitherto, we readily acknowledge ; 

 but that they are calculated to have a great deal, may be argued from the 

 universality of churches and burying-grounds, and from their being visited by 

 every individual perhaps more frequently than any other scene, except that 

 of his daily occupation. A church and churchyard in the country, or a general 

 cemetery in the neighbourhood of a town, properly designed, laid out, orna- 

 mented with tombs, planted with trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants, all 

 named, and the whole properly kept, might become a school of instruction in 



